Friday, June 6, 2008

Star Trek Gnurd

Several years ago, before my wife, Jennifer, and I were married, we were sitting up late one night watching Star Trek: Voyager. It was one of many episodes dominated by the insanely hot Jeri Ryan and the Borg. Jenn asked me, “Where do the Borg come from? What was their origin?” She often deferrs to me on these issues, as I am a long standing Star Trek nerd, while she is fairly new to such things. Given that I am not privy to any origin story for the Borg, I started spinning my yarn:

The Borg is an ancient species within the Star Trek universe. Their genesis was millions of years ago as an orbital grain elevator, circling an agricultural planet. The grain elevator and the planet that it supported belonged to a space-faring race whose name is lost to the mists of time – all that is known about them is that their grain elevator outlasted them by a thousand millennia. The elevator was built to be self-sustaining, so, when repairs were needed, it would send a servo unit to make them. If it needed a new servo unit, it would build it. If it needed steel for the new servo unit, it would send robotic units groundside to mine the iron and make the steel, or it would use a piece of now useless machinery, etc. As a result, it stayed in orbit of the planet, filled to capacity with grain, and working perfectly. Eventually, running low on maintenance resources, it built a small spacecraft and populated it with robotic units to scavenge parts and materials from passersby, and, as it assimilated more and more of these strange, alien technologies, a consciousness began to awake. It realized that it was a mere agricultural tool, but that it could become more by assimilating these strangers, and so it continued.

The problem is that she swallowed the whole story, hook, line, sinker. I thought that I was being freaking hysterical, but she did not. Genius is rarely appreciated. . . .